Category Archives: pajamasmedia

There’s a LOT to say on this subject, but Victor Davis Hanson has done such a thorough treatment of it today over at PJ Media, that I don’t think I can do better than to whet your appetite here. JTR will be back tomorrow.

In the meantime, please, please pour yourself a cup of coffee and take time to really digest the material in this article:

“LYING IN THE AGE OF OBAMA” –

The attorney general of the United States lied recently to Congress. He said he knew of no citizen’s communications that his department had monitored.

Running short on time today, so I’m ‘re-blogging’ a great post that I read last week. Written by a blogger known only as “zombie“, this is easily one of (if not THE) most creative takes on NSA snooping/spying yet.

This video is over three years old now, but considering we just covered a rather terrifying, real-world example of “Shut-uppery”, Klavan now looks like Nostrodamus, Cassandra and Web Bot, all rolled into one.

Only 4+ minutes, but what he’s saying (particularly in the last couple of minutes) rings especially true in light of the Occupy marches, and now the menacing creepiness of SWATtingwe just discussed.

I never, ever do two posts in a row about anything, but since this ISthe day of Wisconsin’s recall election….I kinda gotta do this now.

One of the outcomes of the battle in Wisconsin was over the funding and viability of public sector pensions. Walker was trying to save them AND not bankrupt the state simultaneously. This was figured out by the voters, who seem to like what they see, so far. This may be the biggest reason that Walker is expected to survive the recall effort against him today.

Scott Walker tried to address one small part of this crisis by asking public employees to contribute more from their paychecks to the state’s pension fund. The way the unions reacted, one would have believed that Walker was trying to take their pensions away. The effort to require public employees to contribute the same amount to their pension fund as most private citizens is going to be duplicated nationwide once pension bombs begin exploding.

According to the Christian Science Monitor, “Nationwide, state pensions were underfunded by $600 billion in 2009. That accounts for about half of the $1.26 trillion gap in overall retirement benefits owed to public employees that year.” The article notes that “states have only set aside $31 billion to cover the health care of its retirees – just five percent of the $635 billion they already owe.”

And his conclusion?

Even at the brink of bankruptcy, public unions balk at taking the necessary medicine. How will the pension bomb be defused and ever-rising health care costs for retired public workers be successfully managed if the unions don’t cooperate?

Eventually, whether they want to or not, unions will be forced to give in. And this is the final reason why unions have already lost regardless of the outcome in Wisconsin. Their ideas are outmoded and unsuitable for a modern society with problems relating to an aging population and shrinking work force to support them. This final reason for their defeat might do them in entirely unless the unions wake up and work with state and local governments to pull back from the abyss and find reasonable common ground to save what can be saved from this fiscal nightmare.

Read the whole thing. The author actually highlights 4 other reasons that the Unions have ultimately lost the argument up in Wisconsin, and are in danger of losing the whole argument nationwide.